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Questions of Method in Cultural Studies Questions of Method in Cultural Studies Edited by Mimi White and James Schwoch Questions of Method in Cultural Studies Questions of Method in Cultural Studies Edited by Mimi White and James Schwoch Editorial material and organization © 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Mimi White and James Schwoch to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Questions of method in cultural studies / edited by Mimi White and James Schwoch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-22977-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-22977-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-631-22978-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-22978-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Culture—Study and teaching. 2. Culture—Methodology. I. White, Mimi, 1953– II. Schwoch, James, 1955– HM623.Q84 2006 306¢.071—dc22 2005019316 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 11/13pt Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd, Kundli The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction: The Questions of Method in Cultural Studies 1 James Schwoch and Mimi White Part I: Space/Time/Objects 17 Introduction 19 2 From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale 21 Anna McCarthy 3 Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society as Research Method 54 John Durham Peters 4 “Read thy self ”: Text, Audience, and Method in Cultural Studies 71 John Hartley Part II: Production and Reception: The Politics of Knowledge 105 Introduction 107 5 Cultural Studies of Media Production: Critical Industrial Practices 109 John Caldwell Contents 6 Feminism and the Politics of Method 154 Joke Hermes 7 Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media: Old Problems and New Challenges 175 Andrea Press and Sonia Liingstone Part III: Cultural Studies and Selected Disciplines: Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnomusicology, Popular Music Studies 201 Introduction 203 8 Mixed and Rigorous Cultural Studies Methodology – an Oxymoron? 205 Micaela di Leonardo 9 Is Globalization Undermining the Sacred Principles of Modernity? 221 Pertti Alasuutari 10 Engagement through Alienation: Parallels of Paradox in World Music and Tourism in Sarawak, Malaysia 241 Gini Gorlinski 11 For the Record: Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, and the Search for Method in Popular Music Studies 285 Tim Anderson Index 308 i Notes on Contributors Pertti Alasuutari, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Research Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Tampere, Finland. He is editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and has published widely in the areas of cultural and media studies and qualitative methods. His books include Desire and Craing: A Cul- tural Theory of Alcoholism (1992); Researching Culture: Qualitatie Method and Cultural Studies (1995); An Initation to Social Research (1998); Rethinking the Media Audience (1999); and Social Theory and Human Reality (2004). Tim Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University. He has published in journals such as Cinema Journal, The Velet Light Trap, and American Music. His book, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording, is slated for publication in 2005. He is currently working on a project dealing with the early history of the American music program, Soul Train. John Caldwell, a media studies scholar and filmmaker, is Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. His books include Teleisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in Contemporary Teleision, Electronic Media and Technoculture; New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices; and the forthcoming Production Culture: Industrial Reflexiity and Critical Practice in Film/Teleision. He is also the producer/director of the award-winning documentaries Rancho California (por faor), and Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath. Y2 ii Notes on Contributors Gini Gorlinski has studied the musics of the Kenyah, Kayan, and other interior peoples of Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo for two decades. She has conducted four years of fieldwork, and returns to the island as often as possible to continue old projects, initiate new ones, and visit her adopted families and friends. She received an M.A. (Music/ Ethnomusicology) from the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa in 1989, and a Ph.D. (Music/Ethnomusicology) from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1995. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New Groe Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Borneo Research Bulletin, Journal of Musicological Research, and Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Continuum). Her current projects include an instructional Kenyah dance DVD/VCD, a sampé’ (plucked lute) audio CD, and a book manuscript, “From the Rock to the Rhyme: A Portrait of Society, Song, and Verse in Kenyah Community of Sarawak, Malaysia.” Gorlinski teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. John Hartley is a professor in the Creative Industries Research & Applications Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He was founding dean of the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT, and founding head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. He has written many books and articles on cultural, media, and journalism studies, including Creatie Industries (editor, Blackwell, 2005); A Short History of Cultural Studies (2003); The Indigenous Public Sphere (with Alan McKee, 2000); American Cultural Studies: A Reader (edited with Roberta E. Pearson, 2000); Uses of Teleision (1999); and Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (1996). He is editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Joke Hermes teaches television studies at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and she is Professor of Public Opinion Formation at Inholland University. She is also co-founder and editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her research is on popular culture and cultural citizenship. Popular genres, media ethnography, and gender are recurrent topics in her published work. Her most recent book is Re-reading Popular Culture (Blackwell, 2005). Micaela di Leonardo is Professor of Anthropology and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She has written The Varieties of Ethnic Experience (Cornell, 1984); and Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, iii Notes on Contributors Others, American Modernity (1998); edited Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (1991); and co-edited The Gender/Sexuality Reader (1997). She is currently writing The View From Caallaro’s, an historical eth- nography of gender, race, political economy, and public culture in New Haven, Connecticut, and will be Residential Fellow at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2005–06. Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology and a member of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published widely on the subject of media audiences. Her recent work concerns children, young people and the Internet, as part of a broader interest in the domestic, familial, and educational contexts of new media access and use. Books include Making Sense of Teleision (2nd edition, 1998); Mass Consumption and Personal Identity (with Peter Lunt, 1992); Talk on Teleision (with Peter Lunt, 1994); Children and Their Changing Media Enironment (edited with Moira Bovill, 2001); The Handbook of New Media (edited with Leah Lievrouw, 2002); Young People and New Media (2002); Audiences and Publics (edited, 2005); and her current project, Children and the Internet (2006). Anna McCarthy is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is author of Ambient Teleision (2001) and coeditor, with Nick Couldry, of the anthology MediaSpace (2004). Her essays on television and other media have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including October, The Journal of Visual Culture, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and GLQ. She is currently working on a study of television, culture and citizenship in the postwar United States. John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, University of Iowa. He is the author of more than forty articles and book chapters,
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